Last week, a prominent visual art critic wrote, “I believe that being critical of a work of art is a way of showing it respect.” He was lamenting the trend of mainstream outlets publishing mostly positive exhibition reviews, to the near exclusion of negative ones, which he sees as a disservice to the visual arts and to the public. In theory, and in a culture that enthusiastically and equitably supports the visual arts, I would agree.

But we don't live in that culture. So, we need to have a reckoning about the specific purpose of visual art criticism in our society at this moment in time. But in order to do that, we first need to look at the purpose of art criticism¹ in general.

At its best, art criticism—whether its subject is dance, theater, film, music, or visual art—broadens and deepens the levels of appreciation and connoisseurship for that art form within the general population. By modeling nuanced interpretations of works of art and offering thoughtful examinations of opposing viewpoints, it emboldens members of the public to develop their own complicated opinions about whatever art form is being discussed. Good criticism should also help illuminate a work’s historical and cultural context, technique, processes, and message, while offering an educated assessment of whether or not it was successful in accomplishing what it set out to do. All of this taken together helps nurture an audience that is more discerning, more curious, and more invested in a particular form of art than they would otherwise be.

Film criticism is a perfect example of this. Forty years ago, the average movie goer wasn’t walking out of the multiplex talking about the cinematography or the sound editing of the movie they just saw. These days, I often hear regular people—by which I mean people who have no affiliation with the film or TV industry—having intense and sophisticated conversations about the way a movie was scored or the visual metaphors of the costuming or the conceptual framework of the production design. The general level of connoisseurship around filmmaking has risen dramatically in the last few decades due, in part, to an increase in the quantity and quality of the criticism widely available to us.

For example, after having watched an episode of television about which I have questions, I can (and often do) go online to read multiple insightful and well-written analyses of that episode penned by critics with completely different lived experiences and different points of view informed by variegated sets of cultural references. In this context, I love and appreciate reading both positive and negative reviews because they help me to notice areas of consensus and points of contention amongst critics. They also provide me with new ways of seeing and remind me how utterly subjective and personal all of our experiences with art are.

This level of cultural engagement and exchange around film is only possible because the quality of film and television is arguably higher than it has ever been, while at the same time the the art form has become more accessible—first through tape and DVD rentals and now thanks to streaming services—to a greater percentage of the population than ever before. This creates a perfect feedback loop: when an art form is so accessible as to become a regular fixture in people’s lives, it feeds an increased appetite for varied and accessible criticism, which leads to higher levels of connoisseurships, which demands even more interesting and varied criticism to better reflect the population, and so on.

The role that film criticism serves at this point in our history is not the same as the role that visual art criticism should serve because our culture’s relationship to film as an art form is, in almost every regard, as far away from the culture’s relationship to visual art as it could possibly be.

To give you some sense of what I’m talking about, let’s look at one measure of how we regard the visual arts in the U.S.: if we consider a country's spending a reflection of its values, we can deduce that over the same period of time that we were becoming increasingly enamored of film and spending more money on it, support for the visual arts in the U.S. waned dramatically.

According to a 2021 report from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), if the NEA had maintained its percentage of non-defense discretionary spending from when Ronald Regan was president in 1984, the current budget would be four times larger than it is. In addition, if the federal government had simply taken the NEA's 1992 budget and done nothing but adjust it for inflation, the 2020 budget "would have been $326 million...instead of $162.25 million, a $164 million difference," according to the same report.

As it is, we spend less than one penny a week per person on the federal arts budget, and there are plenty of folks who consider that a profligate expenditure. In their minds, it's not even worth each of us spending the price of a pack of gum once a year to fund the arts program for the entire country. At the same time, we have an art establishment that actively seeks to nurture inaccessibility, exclusivity, and scarcity so as to create the greatest amount of wealth for the fewest number of people.

Combine these two things and you get a general population that has low engagement in and low appreciation for the visual arts. As a result, we have incredibly low demand for visual arts criticism.² (And the criticism we do have is written for a small audience that is already interested and engaged.)

In the current climate, an exhibition by a lesser-known artist, or an exhibition that is happening outside of a main cultural center, is wildly lucky to get a single write up. If that write up is a negative review written by a white dude who believes that he’s showing respect to the art by talking about all the ways that he thinks it’s unsuccessful, we are not in fact doing the visual arts any favors in the long-term.

Right now, our primary goal for visual arts criticism should be to expand the number of people we’re talking to. That means writing about art in ways that are accessible and relatable to a greater portion of the population. It means nudging them toward having personal experiences with visual art in any of its forms, which will increase their level of comfort as well as the likelihood that they will make it a regular part of their lives. It also means not using the precious few column inches we have left in mainstream publications to tell readers about an unsuccessful show that they shouldn’t bother seeing, and using them instead to gush about the shows and artists we love, giving readers every reason to seek them out.

By increasing the size and engagement of the audience, we create the conditions that lead to greater levels of connoisseurship, increased appetite for criticism, and a call for significantly more arts funding.

I know that many of you reading this will have strong feelings and thoughtful ideas about the role of criticism, so please feel free to share them, to disagree with me, or to open up new lines of discussion in the comments!